As a business owner or a manager in charge of a team, it’s important to keep your employees motivated. If they are motivated, they’ll work harder and be more productive, and they’ll be happier in their work at the same time. This will lead to better results, happier customers, and, hopefully, more profits overall.
It can be hard to work out how to motivate your team in the right way, but it’s well worth considering some options and experimenting with ideas where you can. In this way, you’ll find exactly the right way (or ways) to ensure you get the best out of your workers.
One thing you can try is to use incentives. When you incentivise your employees to do good work, they will want to achieve the rewards on offer, and that will encourage better productivity, more teamwork, and even more loyalty, all of which build a better business and a better work environment. With that in mind, here are some of the ways you can give your employees incentives to help them and you achieve much more.
Identify What Motivates Your Employees
If the incentives you want to offer are going to have the positive results you’re looking for, you’ll need to ensure that you offer the right ones. That means working out what incentives are going to be best for your team or even the individual members within it.
It’s good to remember that everyone is different, so pay attention to your team and what could work for them. Some might like to have extra vacation days, and others might like a monetary prize. A voucher for a great restaurant or gift cards from Appreciate Business Services could be a great option. Some might be happy with a mention in an employee or business newsletter.
Rather than opting for just one kind of incentive, you might need to offer a variety and allow your various team members to choose what works for them best. This might seem complicated, but it doesn’t have to be – keep the choices relatively narrow, with two or three different options after asking your team members directly about what they would prefer to have, and each individual member will be a lot more motivated to work well and hard.
Set Achievable Goals
If you want to be able to reap the benefits of giving your employees incentives, you’ll need to make the goals you set them achievable. If you don’t, it won’t matter what incentives are on offer because your team will become frustrated and feel demotivated and never actually get the incentives at all. In fact, in this case, having incentives on offer might make them feel worse.
If you make the goals you set reachable and possible, and if your employees are therefore able to receive their rewards for a job well done, their motivational levels will rise. Not only that but when other team members see that the rewards are real, they’ll start to work towards their goals as well.
Goals must always be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) if they are going to work. Of course, you must also ensure they are not too easy to achieve, as the rewards you give will mean less, and the motivational aspect of those incentives could be missing.
Make Progress Visible
Even when you have great incentives in place that your team is going to want and will happily work towards, progress can sometimes be slow. If your employees don’t know quite how close they are to getting their rewards, it can be hard to feel motivated.
This is why it’s important to make their progress visible. Have a whiteboard on display or a digital option if you prefer, and keep adding to it to show everyone how far they are from achieving whatever goal it is they have been set. This alone can be an incentive to work harder, and when there is a reward at the end of it all, this will help even more.
Ask For Feedback
Sometimes the way you envision doing something isn’t the best way for that thing to be done. You might have what you think of as a great idea, but in practice, it just doesn’t work. This should not be thought of as a negative thing; if something isn’t working, you can make adjustments to ensure that it does work, making positive changes within your business as you do so.
Yet in order to do this, you have to know what isn’t working. That’s why asking your team for feedback is so important. Once you know what they do or don’t like about your incentive scheme (or anything else to do with your business, come to that), you can improve it, and their motivation levels will improve too.
